The Policing of Occupy Wall Street: The Conflict between Defiance and Order

The Occupy Wall Street movement has presented a series of
challenges to local law enforcement agencies. In response,
many of them have relied on a variety of aggressive tactics,
which in some cases have shocked public opinion, putting the
issue of protest policing on the national agenda. Three main
narratives have emerged to explain these tactics: 1) there has
been a broad “militarization” of the police brought on by the
Federal War on Drugs and anti-terrorism spending. 2) There
has been a nationally coordinated effort to repress the OWS
movement because of the threat it poses to existing political and
economic arrangements. 3) local police have been forced to act
because OWS encampments have been a source of permit
violations, sanitations problems, and secondary criminality.
Each of these explanations holds important truths, but they all
fail to capture the underlying nature of the conflict between
OWS and the police. Reviewing accounts and videos of police
actions and protestor tactics in ten major US cities, journalist
commentaries on these actions, and publically available official
documents, I conclude that there is a fundamental conflict
between the strong orientation of OWS demonstrators in favor
of defiant non-violent protest and the current orientation of
many US police forces towards zero-tolerance order
maintenance policing.